Where it all begins...
THE EARLY YEARS (1901–1933)
The Boston baseball club was formed in 1901 after the Minor Western League, led by Ban Johnson, declared its equality with the National League and changed its name in American League.
As the owner of the new league, Johnson decided that for the good of the business the city of Boston needed a team so he moved the Buffalo club to the Massachusetts and named it Boston Americans.
In the first years of the new franchise, playing their home games at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Boston was the team to beat and they capture the first edition of the modern Word Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1903 and the American League pennants in 1904. Those great teams were lead by Jimmy Collins, the superstar third baseman and manager of the team (he was first player to play third base inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1945 and he is considered one of the greatest of all time) and by pitcher Cy Young (the player with more wins in history with 511 in 22 years of career, elected to the Hall of Fame in 1937).
Cy Young in action
After some years of renovations in the lineup several new players finally helped the officially called Red Sox, with their new home: Fenway Park, to come back in the championship race. The team won their second World Series in 1912, helped by a super-trio of outfield (Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis) and a great pitcher like the flamethrower “Smoky” Joe Wood (called Smoky for his nasty fastball). This win arrived against the New York Giants in a series known as “Snodgrass’s Muff” for an error on an easy fly ball in the tenth inning of the deciding game by Fred Snodgrass, the NY Giants center fielder.
In 1914 the Boston Red Sox signed Babe Ruth, which is considered the greatest baseball player in history. With the “Bambino” on the field the team won other three championship in 1915, 1916 and 1918.
Babe "Bambino" Ruth
But hard times were coming. In fact on December 26, 1919 Harry Frazee, the owner of the club, decided to sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, just to finance a Broadway play that never opened. This was the beginning of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, one of the most intense in sport history. This sold was also the beginning of the "Curse of the Bambino", a legend which try to explain the failure of the Boston Red Sox after the departure of Ruth.
In these years the owner Harry Frazee is most interested in Broadway shows than baseball at Fenway and, after a while, he decided to leave the Red Sox. Before that he sold the best players for mediocre prospects and money. The most part of these superstars went to the Yankees and helped the furious Yankees-Red Sox rivalry to be alimented. Without guys like Harry Harper, Everett Scott, Herb Pennock and “Bullet” Joe Bush, along with Ruth, the team was in a real bad moment with a lot of loosing seasons in the 20s and 30s.